As our previous tip pointed out, the TouchPad is able to print to any modern HP printer connected to the same network, but what happens if your printer is not a HP one? As is typical for webOS, when something doesn't work out of the box, the homebrew community will find a way to get it to work. In this case, webOS Nation forum member theomodsim created a program that you can run on a Windows computer (or linux, see below) called Touch2Pc Printer. According to the forum thread for Touch2Pc Printer, it "emulates an HP printer and accepts print jobs from the TouchPad. From there, the received job is converted to PDF and optionally printed to a physical printer added to Windows." So, unlike your typical printing from a TouchPad that only requires a network connected printer, this method does require that a Windows computer also be on the same network to intercept the print job before it gets to the printer. Or if you don't have a printer, you can also set up Touch2Pc Printer to "print" to a PDF file on your computer.

Touch2Pc Printer requires that you have .NET Framework 4 installed on your computer, but you can find all the details you need for installing that as well as downloading and installing the Touch2Pc Printer application right in our forums. Instead of replicating the instructions here, just jump over to the forums for any latest updates or to report any issues that you may have with the application. And as is always the case with these homebrew solutions, remember that these applications may not work perfectly for everyone, but this seems to work really well for most. And if you do have any issues, you can always post it in the forum thread and hopefully you can get your issues resolved.

Don't have a Windows PC but rather have a linux computer? No problem, as forum member jb23 modified the Touch2Pc Printer code to make it work as a commandline version. Just check out his forum post in the Touch2Pc Printer thread for details on getting this to work.

12 Comments

The app works wonderfully for me, but that doesn't mean it's perfect.
If development is still on-going with this app, I would love to see the following added:

- Add a setting that will allow the app to start minimized

- If I close the app's window, the app should still be open instead of closing outright. In this scenario, the app window should collapse to the notification area. One should then only be able to close the app by right-clicking the notification icon and selecting Exit.

- It would be nice if the application had an option to install the app as a Windows Service, preventing the app window from being shown at all.

If such things required a registered, paid version, I would gladly pay the cost.

Hey Adam, I take back my words in the prior "Print from Touchpad". You cannot throw your egg onto one bucket, the same you cannot write all into on article. I understand that now.
Great info for all webOS Nation's community, mostly for those of us that are not so tech-geek and need this kind of articles to know that there are people out there watching for us... ta-daaa! The HOMEBREW COMMUNITY!!!
EDIT: AWESOME article rating!

actually, I was not aware of this application before writing my previous tip. it was the comments to that tip that prompted this one. And of course, if you know of other great tips or homebrew solutions out there, you can always submit them through our contact page at http://www.webosnation.com/contact :-)

It is also worth mentioning that this app has uses even beyond the TouchPad for printing PCL output from any source to a non-PCL printer. For example, You could share an el-cheapo non-PCL printer on a Windows machine on your network, and be able to print to it from machines running Linux, OS X, or even another version of Windows for which printer drivers for said el-cheapo printer don't otherwise exist! I tested this sort of setup just to see, and it does work.